Extracts from Peter Shure's Diaries: March 1990

WEDNESDAY 28 MARCH

I cannot believe Martin has booked me to do shoot a bloody advert on a Saturday! I have to trek all the way up to London to help sell a bloody breakfast cereal. I’m to be dressed up as Wee Willie Winky or some such nonsense, only to be woken by the racket of a breakfast cereal that somehow pops and fizzles when the milk is poured onto it. This is what scientists spend their time on now – inventing noisy cereals rather than curing cancer or getting us back to the moon.

Is this to be my fate? TV advertisements and ‘advisory’ roles on dreary arthouse fodder? I sincerely thought Martin would do better for me than that. He even considered signing my up for a bloody Butlins Holiday world advert without asking me! He couldn’t see at all why I might balk at that. As if I'd ever go bakc there.

‘If you don’t want the work then maybe you should think seriously about retirement planning,” he said. Then in the same breath presented me with the idea of advising on some ghastly sci-fi film about spacemen who put themselves into what he called’ hypersleep’ ,and then have to wake up and battle aliens. What am I supposed to tell a young actor to do in that situation? Get in your pod, close your eyes and remember the Alamo?

Retirement is a ghastly prospect. What would I do with myself? I hate watching television. I loathe gardening. Reading gives me headaches. I have very few friends nearby who I can abide ,and I certainly don’t want to play bridge with them. Or tennis. Or bowls. I would simply drink and doze myself into oblivion. Perhaps that is Martin’s plan. Drive me into the grave so he can have the house to himself and all that comes with it.

 

SATURDAY 31 MARCH

Got home about 8 this evening and Martin was all in a panic asking if I was alright. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘your blessed cereal advertisement is all done’. He was rather taken aback that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Riots! Looting! Police horses charging into crowds. Cars being set on fire. I had no idea. After the shoot I took off to the Garrick for a rewarding snifter and then toddled off down to Waterloo for my train. Yes, there was noise. There's always noise in London. There were police out and about and a lot of oiks carrying placards, and one or two of them toting large bin bags with god-knows-what in them. But I thought that was normal for London these days. So grubby, so full of litter and unhappy rowdy people. And always a background hum of impending violence that makes one keep one's head odwn as you walk around. Never catch anyone's eye in London, I say. No wonder people like Devon make the films they do . That’s why I want nothing to do with the place.

Martin was appalled that I hadn’t even noticed. ‘You were right there,’ he said. 'What were you doing? Sleepwalking through the place?’

Indeed. Maybe I was. I prefer to think I made a deliberate decision not to notice. I have being doing that quite a lot recently. So much so that I think Martin thinks he can do pretty much anything he likes.  He’s starting to remind me of Dirk in that film ‘The Servant’ – which I suppose would make me the other fellow who comes under his thrall. Is that how it is to be? Me under Martin’s thumb? Dammit, I can’t even remember how that film ends. Not well, I’d wager.

 

WEDNESDAY 4 APRIL

I have decided to get the diaries out of the house. They can’t be here.

The tapes will have to stay. They are as much Martin’s property as mine in a twisted way. Blast it, why did I ever agree to them? He pushes me on things I’d rather forget. Brings up people and places that I haven’t really thought about for years and years – for good reason.

I have ended up saying the most ridiculous things. Some things best not said. I rather wonder if he isn’t putting a dose in my drink to make me loosen my tongue. He keeps me up til all hours, pecking away at something he thinks is so bally important.  I suppose I could have pretended to fall asleep, but after all this time I doubt he would tumble for that. He’s seen it too many times before.

It's my own fault, I’ll admit it. I agreed to the idea that he’d have all this juicy material to draw on for a book after I’m gone. Something he can use for a bit of security. I promised Martin C I’d look after him after all. But how much of me does he need, I ask myself. How much of me have I ever wanted to let slip or hand over to someone else?

At least with this diary business it’s all me, me alone, and whatever has cropped up each day. No side to it. No looking back. I can say what I like to myself.

 

FRIDAY 6 APRIL

I’ve been packing all the diaries up today for the post, knowing Martin wouldn’t be here to see it. I enjoyed flicking through some of the old ones as I piled them into boxes.

The stuff from the Sixties and Seventies is quite amusing in parts, although often it feels like a bit of pose. Not really me. I think in those days I was always asking myself ‘what would Noel Coward do?’ Sit down with a drink and review the day. Add a few catty words about whoever he’d been working with. Drop a few names. Bear witness to a Royal Performance, the private dinner parties, exotic holidays in the Caribbean. Perhaps it wasn’t a pose. Perhaps that was what I was like. Could I have been that self-absorbed?

We’re all writing for posterity in the end. Something to fill the coffers of the estate when we’re gone. So perhaps I was trying to be more entertaining and egotistical as a result – the epitome of the vainglorious B-movie actor!

Not so true of the war diaries. Wretched suff. But in a way much more straightforward. It was nice to see it there on those old scraps of paper in my most basic of handwriting. I’ve played those scenes over in my head a thousand million times. The stuff of nightmares. But reading it now, it doesn’t touch me quite as much. Maybe because I know where it ends.

Funny really. My stomach turned when I picked up the ’45 diary. Felt a bit shaky. But I have to say in the end it was a calming experience, meeting my younger self in such dire straits. I was quite a plucky little blighter! And a pretty decent bloke, I’d say. There I was thinking it would be a ghastly tale of horror and death, but of course it’s about survival. I’ve been a silly sod not to have dug it out sooner. It might have helped me calm down about it all, rather than letting it haunt me all this time.

I remember when I first started driving fast cars and hanging out with Bob and Mike and the rest of them, I used to use the memory of Helen’s face to keep me calm. In the middle of a tight tennis match or a difficult shoot, I could stop myself from blowing up or hyperventilating by imagining Helen looking at me with her serious face, warning me not to go over the top, telling me with her eyes and pursed lips to breathe and be my better self. Nowadays I can't think of Helen without getting wound up and annoyed!

In a way, though, reading back through it all again today had the same effect as Helen did then. I feel much calmer. I sense I shall sleep well tonight.

I haven’t kept any of them with me though. I don’t want Martin reading any of that. It’s just for me. At least until I peg it.

Off to Skegness with the lot!